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Anarchism signifies the actions taken to bring about a fairer, more equal, non-hierarchical, and democratic society, one that exists without State coercion or domination. Although community psychology has engaged with some anarchist practices, such as mutual aid, the discipline has had little explicit or direct engagement with anarchism's broader project of sociopolitical organization, with a notable exception. Almost fifty years ago, Seymour Sarason argued for what he called the anarchist insight, urging community psychologists to be wary of how they interact with oppressive State apparatuses that cause considerable psychological damage within communities. In this article, I draw on Sarason's conception of the anarchist insight as an entry point into what I prefer to think of as the insights of anarchism. The insights of anarchism, I posit, are the knowledges derived from the fragments of anarchism that already exist in communities. The task of community psychologists concerned with the insights of anarchism is to work with people to communicate, strengthen, and make connections between these different fragments. Drawing from my own work, I examine how residents from a low-income community produced and screened a participatory documentary film that connected the everyday anarchism of a community garden to social movement organizing, where the role of the State was intensely debated. I conclude by considering some of the ways by which future community psychology work can consolidate the insights of anarchism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Those working from within the liberation psychology paradigm strive to remould psychology so that it might be put to work for the task of liberation – a task with which most psychologists have, historically, been wholly unconcerned. In practice, liberation psychology tends to be porous, multiple, and under-resourced. Indeed, much of what we might think of as liberation psychology is not referred to as such by its practitioners. Surfacing liberation psychology, then, requires reading into its undocumented histories. In this article, we attempt to develop a picture of liberation psychology in South Africa (SA) by reading the archives of Mohamed Seedat, a pioneering practitioner of liberation psychology. Grounded in the working-class south of Johannesburg and underwritten by expansive global commitments to liberation, Seedat’s archive spans almost four decades, passing through many disciplines, communities, political traditions, and affective registers. We suggest that his archive offers us insights into the affective components of history, developing community praxis in apartheid and post-apartheid SA, and humanising knowledge-making. We conclude by reflecting on how liberation psychology archives like Seedat’s serve as under-appreciated resources for grappling with the psycho-political constitution of emancipatory struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although critical community psychology (CCP) has embraced several discursive paradigms (e.g., critical discourse analysis, discursive psychology, and Foucauldian discourse analysis), there remains little CCP work that attempts to conceive of CCP through a poststructuralist discursive lens, a lens that extends beyond, but certainly does not ignore, the analysis of data. In this study, we consider what we are calling poststructuralist discursive community psychology through a synthesis of poststructuralist discourse theory and CCP. Such a psychology is one that conceives of social phenomena, and indeed conceives of itself, through a poststructuralist understanding of discourse. We offer two pathways through which to consider poststructuralist discursive community psychology: re‐envisioning community and discursive consciousness‐raising. We conclude by considering some of the theoretical limitations of our discussion, as well as the areas that future work into poststructuralist discursive community psychology may enter into. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The manner by which power is reified through newspaper reporting can assist community psychologists in getting a handle on the complex, often contradictory, ways by which ideology and power are constituted in relation to particular communities. Accordingly, the present study draws on discursive psychology to analyse how 377 newspaper articles construct the community of Thembelihle (a low‐income community in South Africa) and how these constructions can inform counter‐hegemonic strategy. Two discourses were identified in the analysis, Signifying Legitimacy and Containing the Protest Community. Where the Signifying Legitimacy discourse established a Statist legitimacy‐illegitimacy binary against which Thembelihle was to be assessed, the Containing the Protest Community discourse constructed Thembelihle as a monolithic entity that enacted a wholly violent, and often directionless, mode of protest violence which was concerned with little more than 'service delivery'. Together, these discourses suggest to us the manner by which low‐income communities are engaged by the State as well as how Statist representations function materially. Certainly, most newspaper articles relied on an interpretive frame whose hermeneutics were characterised primarily by violence and homogenously experienced suffering. Such representation, we argue, signifies the dominant discursive field and ideology against which counter‐hegemonic strategy and (re)presentation must act. Highlights: Fleshes out a means of analyzing dominant discourse.Offers considerations for the development of counter‐hegemony.Demonstrates the use of critical media studies for community psychologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to the twinned crises of ecology and political economy, we face today a crisis of care. The crisis of care, I contend, is fundamentally a political and an ethical crisis. In this short commentary, I outline the structural (i.e., systemic) and reproductive (i.e., labour) character of this crisis, using the COVID‐19 pandemic as an example. From here, I argue for the imperative to centre an expansive conception of care in critical community psychology work. Specifically, I posit that by working with and alongside activist care workers, community psychologists can assist in building socially just modalities of care. After reflecting on my work with collective caring initiatives, I offer five (tentative) guiding principles for a community psychology that is committed to addressing the crisis of care, namely: (1) commitment to building political coalitions; (2) commitment to refuting capitalist conceptions of care; (3) commitment to expanding conceptions of care; (4) commitment to embracing the psychological consequences of care work; and (5) a politicoethical commitment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oral history presents an especially effective way of exploring the multitudinous, contradictory, and contextual meanings that are attached to the notion of community. In this study, we argue for narrative‐discourse analysis as a critical means of studying contested community memories. We rely on focus group discussions and individual interviews to explore oral histories of state‐sanctioned relocation of residents of Thembelihle, a low‐income community in Johannesburg, South Africa. Our analysis revealed the sharply splintered politics that characterizes oral histories of this community. We argue that oral histories, in their contradictory and visceral fullness, are able to point toward a politics of resistance that is sensitive to inequalities, and that are willed toward emancipatory future‐building. We conclude by underlining the need for community psychologists to engage with a politics of memory that is sensitive to power differentials, historiography, and broader currents of oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]